7 SSL Certificate Problems That Kill Trust

Nothing tanks user trust faster than a browser security warning. That red padlock, the "Your connection is not private" interstitial—most visitors won't click through it. They'll leave. And they probably won't come back. SSL certificates are one of those things that work invisibly until they don't. And when they fail, they fail loudly. Here are seven problems that catch teams off guard, and how to spot them before your users do. 1. The Certificate Expired This is the most common SSL failure, and the most preventable. Every SSL certificate has an expiration date. When that date passes, browsers immediately distrust the certificate and show a full-page warning. It happens to everyone. Even massive companies have let certificates expire on production systems. The problem is that certificate renewal is easy to forget when it only happens once a year (or once every 90 days with Let's Encrypt). The person who set it up might have left the company. The auto-renewal might have failed silently.